Recently several guys from the organizing committee has visited the city of Girona and the venue. They also taken lots of pictures and made several videos. In the coming days you can find a selection of these images on this website. Starting with a short impression of the city and the venue.

LWN.net has kindly offered to promote the State Of The Map 2010 on their website.

LWN.net is the premier source for news from the Linux and free software worlds. Each week, LWN provides in-depth coverage of a variety of topics of interest to developers and users of free software. During the rest of the week, LWN has information about breaking news in the community, including a daily summary of Linux distribution security alerts. The weekly contains unparalleled Linux kernel coverage and software reviews by the Grumpy Editor, as well as stories on distribution news, security vulnerabilities, development projects and more.

The Knight Foundation has given away over $20 million towards news innovation through theKnight News Challenge, a five-year $25 million initiative to build the next-generation infrastructure to inform and engage communities.

The News Challenge is interested in all layers of the map stack, including data gathering, tile rendering, and interactive consumer-facing applications.

The requirements to enter the Knight News Challenge are three-fold: innovation, involving news and information, and having a local geographic angle. In general, the reviewers look favorably upon projects that can be considered catalytic — whether as a proof-of-concept, creating open-source infrastructure tools that can be leveraged by others, or taking an existing project with traction that can be brought to scale. It is generally a strength if an applicant has an existing history with open source projects or has an existing beta product. The News Challenge requires any code and intellectual property funded by the foundation to be released open source or under Creative Commons by the end of the grant.

Jennifer 8. Lee, the lead Knight News Challenge reviewer, will be available at theState of The Map conference in Girona, Spain to explain how to craft an effective proposal and to field questions.

Last year the contest received over 2,300 proposals. The initial application is a simple set of questions, designed to help lead people who have never gone through a grant process before. As you proceed through the rounds, the questions get more detailed.

The next deadline will be in fall 2010. Please visitnewschallenge.org for more information.

Spot Image is a provider of added-value satellite imagery and geospatial services. Starting as the commercial operator of the SPOT satellites, Spot Image is now a supplier of imagery from a range of other optical and radar Earth-imaging satellites.

Spot Image supports the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters (http://www.disasterscharter.org/) by its capacity and daily revisit capability to acquire imagery of any point on Earth. In addition, the rich global archive of SPOT imagery compiled since 1986, now containing nearly 20 million images, provides pre-disaster images of a region of interest for comparative analysis and damage assessment. Spot Image also participate in SAFER (Services and Applications For Emergency Response : http://www.emergencyresponse.eu/ ) which is a large European project funded in the frame of the GMES initiative (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security).

When the case of global warming was so widely made in 2006, Spot Image could not do but decide to engage in action to tackle it: no other industry is better placed than Earth Observation to support projects and action fighting Climate Change. Planet Action (http://www.planet-action.org/) was launched in 2007 by Spot Image, leading supplier of satellite imagery and geo-information, joined by ESRI, leading GIS technologies provider as co-founder. Planet Action objectives are to support local projects acting on Climate Change-related issues by providing geographic information and technology to NGOs, universities, research centers…

The successful Pro Users’ Day will also kick off the first day of State of the Map in Girona. Like SOTM 2009 in Amsterdam, it will primarily focus on emerging professional users of OpenStreetMap. We have seen a huge increase in the professional adoption of OpenStreetMap. The State of the Map will feature presentations from Skobbler, 1 Spatial Nutiteq and CloudMade – some of the most innovative companies who are pioneering the commercial use of OpenStreetMap data.

Saturday and Sunday will be more OSM community oriented. Saturday launches the 4th Annual SOTM conference we all know and love and it’s all about our community. The day is split into two tracks, featuring Community, Technical, Quality and Validation and back by popular demand, the OSI Scholarship Lightning talks!

Sunday isn’t a day of rest at SOTM! The day features talks on Imports, discussions on OSM Foundation, Tools, Maps, Humanitarian works and plenty of time for fun, friends and fantastic auction action!

Fantastic three day tickets which include lunch, refreshments and the famous t-shirts start at €90 for OSM community and Foundation members. Tickets are going fast – don’t wait to register!

Want to be sotm-famous? Are you hungry for status at this year’s conference? Then get your creative juices percolating! The design for our 2010 T-shirts is open and you could be our ‘it’ genius.

Follow these simple guidelines:

1. Talk to the face: design for the front of the shirt. Something within 10″ x 6″ or A5 size is a good working space.
2. You can be Picasso, Dali or Andy Warhol, but try to keep it to four colours.
3. Quite possibly we’re a soccer fan club with a mapping problem, even so: T-shirt must tell us why we were in Girona, Spain on July 9-11, 2010… in case we had too many beers at the social.
4. Please submit works by Friday June 4th midnight to team@stateofthemap.org, in the highest resolution possible. JPEG or TIFF format preferred.

CloudMade, which won ‘Best Emerging Startup‘ at the 2010 Mobile World Congress, returns as our Diamond sponsor of the State of the Map. Within the community CloudMade is well known thanks to the important work of its founders Steve Coast and Nick Black.

CloudMade is a platform and tools company serving consumers, mappers, developers and advertisers around the world. Its user-friendly mapping applications: Mapzen web editor, together with Mapzen POI Collector, for iPhone, significantly reduce the complexity of editing and adding Points of Interest (POIs) to OpenStreetMap.

Thousands of mobile and web developers use CloudMade’s free tools every day to create innovative, geo-enabled products. Its mapping platform powers several market leading location and map based applications from prominent developers. For more information about developing with CloudMade visit http://bit.ly/aN7WSs

ESRI in one of the major Geographic Information Systems vendors for Desktop, Server GIS, Mobile, Web and now Cloud. ESRI is well-known among most GIS professionals. Earlier this year, ESRI surprised the OpenStreetMap community with OSM support in some of their products, including the recently launched www.arcgis.com.

Contribute your Data and Share, Discover and Leverage other Worldwide Maps
and Apps in the Geospatial Community Cloud, hosted by ESRI at www.arcgis.com.

We are pleased to welcome CENATIC (the National Reference Centre of applied open-source IT) as a silver sponsor to the State of the Map.

CENATIC is the Spanish Government’s strategic project to empower the use of open-source software and knowledge in all facets of society. The foundation is commited to position itself as the national centre for excellence, with international projection.

We welcome Nutiteq as sponsor of the State of the Map in Girona. Nutiteq is a mobile software development company in the niche of open mobile mapping solutions. They create apps and provide a mobile mapping SDK to location-based service providers, mobile operators and mobile developers all over the world, with millions of end-users. Nutiteq has used OpenStreetMap as one of the main map data sources.

Also interested in sponsoring the State of the Map 2010? Contact the organising team for more information at sponsors@stateofthemap.org.